April 22’s essential film writing

Read On is a regular feature in which The Dissolve’s staff recommends recent film pieces. Because there’s always someone writing something notable about the movies somewhere on the Internet.

The New York Times’ Brooks Barnes tells the story of how Disney brought the new Star Wars droid BB-8 to shelves: “Last summer, Mr. Iger was doing quick homework on Sphero, a Colorado start-up that had been selected to participate in Disney Accelerator, a program pairing entrepreneurs with mentors from Disney’s senior ranks. Sphero is the maker of a $129 smartphone-controlled robotic ball, which can run for more than an hour on a charge and bounce safely down stairs. ‘I was impressed with the quality of it, and I was really impressed with the user interface,’ Mr. Iger said in a telephone interview late last week. Then he had an idea. Just before his Sphero ball arrived, he had been poring over the designs for droids created for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the movie arriving in theaters in December. One in particular stood out: BB-8, a beeping, free-rolling, orange and white ball with a little half-sphere hat.”

Over at Movie Mezzanine, our own Charles Bramesco examines the agony of comedy: “With Robin Williams’s heartbreaking suicide still fresh in pop culture’s collective memory, the narrative of the humorist belying a bleeding heart remains as potent as ever. In addition, documentaries Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop and Harmontown shed a little light on the flawed personalities of the late-night personality and the creator of NBC’s gleefully metatextual sitcom Community, respectively. Behind every open mic roils a hotbed of self-loathing, anxiety, pettiness and depression. Or so the picture show might have us believe. While the sad-clown narrative certainly has a basis in fact, cinematic portrayals of stand-ups have done a lot to reinforce the inner turmoil the invariably fuels the fire of humor.”

Grantland’s Mark Harris looks at what the firing of Michelle MacLaren means for the state of female directors in Hollywood: “When Jenkins left Thor 2 in late 2011 because of you guessed it, she was replaced by a man, Alan Taylor, and nobody kicked up much of a fuss. But things move forward, and this time, there would have been a fuss. The most generous possible reading of Warner Bros.’s decision to replace MacLaren with Jenkins is that it looked for the best possible director for Wonder Woman and found her. The second-most generous reading is that the studio looked for the best possible woman to direct Wonder Woman, because it thought a woman would be better for the job. The least generous reading is that Warner Bros. would have been happy to hire a man to replace MacLaren but didn’t want the public grief it knew it would get, so it grimly, grudgingly, sourly realized that, uh-oh, better hire a woman, because, you know, everybody’s so touchy these days. That would be a cynical, unpleasant, contemptibly motivated rationale. It would also be progress. When it comes to gender, male-dominated corporations do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons all the time. So doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is a step forward.”

Vulture’s Abraham Riesman talks to Ta-Nehisi Coates about how comics have conquered the world: “‘You’ve written in the past about the identity politics of Marvel. How do you reconcile Marvel’s long-standing belief in outsider characters — people with problems, people who have identity-politics issues — with the fact that, with a handful of notable exceptions, these characters are straight and white?’

‘Comic books aren’t perfect, but listen: In the 1980s, Marvel had a black woman — not just a black woman, a woman who was born in Harlem, a woman who was African-American and whose mother was Kenyan — leading their most popular title. And then when she lost her powers, she was still kicking ass. Like she still had enough to whip Cyclops’s ass. That was something they were doing. I can’t really think of anywhere else I would’ve went at that time to see something like that. Just today I was reading that Hickman one. And this kid, Manifold, is like an Aboriginal. This is incredible! I mean this has to do with Hollywood: You don’t actually see that diversity reflected on-camera. [Comics] are not perfect, especially around gender and the women’s stuff, but you start comparing it to Hollywood, it’s not even a conversation. I mean consider it like this: There could’ve been [a Hollywood] adaptation, a true adaptation, of X-Men in which Storm was the protagonist in the way that we were reading it; that would’ve been a true rendering of what the comic book actually was. But that’s not possible, that’s not possible in Hollywood. It’s deeply sad.”